Archinect - News

How Engineers Are Building a New Railroad Under New York City

2013-05-28T15:13:00-04:00

The biggest public transit infrastructure effort in the US is almost completely invisible — unless you’re 160 feet underground. The East Side Access project will connect the Long Island Railroad to New York’s Grand Central Terminal via a massive tunnel under the East River. Actually, that tunnel was the easy part; it was started in 1969. The hard part? “We are building a brand-new railroad here,” says Michael Horodniceanu, president of Metropolitan Transit Authority Capital Construction.

Beautiful photographs by Dean Kaufman. To view more of his photos from this story, go to his website.

Beautiful photo of sky cranes at WTC site, by BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh

2013-05-08T12:34:00-04:00

When I walked out to get breakfast this morning, clouds had obscured all but the topmost workings of the 1 World Trade Center site, visible through our living room window—a strange vision of machines, pulleys, cranes, and gears sort of hovering in the sky, like something out of Archigram by way of Hayao Miyazaki.

Iwan Baan’s Post-Sandy Manhattan Shot Makes ASME Cover of the Year

2013-05-02T13:51:00-04:00

Congratulations to New York Magazine and Iwan Baan, one of our favorite architectural photographers (and 2012 Golden Lion Winner): The American Society of Magazine Editors has chosen the cover of the November 12, 2012, issue of New York Magazine depicting the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in New York City as "Cover of the Year" in the seventh annual ASME Best Cover Contest.

Sci-Fi Structures Found on Earth Get Transported to Alien World

2013-03-22T19:02:00-04:00

“Photography’s co-option by empirical systems is definitely of interest to me,” says Ryder. “I’m trying to use photography to recontextualize the built environment. The ability to reframe and give new meaning to things is photography’s best attribute as a medium.”

Ever wondered what it feels like to stand on top of the Burj Khalifa?

2013-03-20T17:43:00-04:00

My old battered shoes climbed the worlds tallest building today. What an amazing structure! Tweeting from 820 meters straight up!

Mµ Thermal Imager attachment for the iPhone will detect thermal vulnerabilities in a building

2013-03-02T11:22:00-05:00

In construction or renovation of buildings you'll be able to identify poorly insulated areas and badly wired electrical outlets before you put the drywall up. You'll find places where water has penetrated the structure where it should not have. Identifying mold and moisture is a much easier task with the Mµ Thermal Imager.

Mµ Optics is currently seeking financial support on crowsourced-funding website Indiegogo. The iPhone attachment may offer steep competition to the existing thermal imaging cameras that range in prices from $2,000 to $22,000, according to Mµ Optics. The Mµ Thermal Imager is currently offered for $125 and $150 to early adopters, with a final price goal of less than $200 if they are able to stock the product in the big box stores.

What the White House Looks Like Completely Gutted

2013-02-27T03:12:00-05:00

Harry S Truman inherited a White House that was in horrendous shape. After the British nearly burnt it to the ground in 1814, the construction of 20th-century innovations—indoor plumbing, electricity, and heating ducts—had also taken its toll on the structure. The building was nearly 150 years old, and it showed its age. In November 1948, the building was in a near-condemnable state... So it had to be gutted. Completely.

Cramped Hong Kong Apartments from Above

2013-02-25T16:53:00-05:00

The Chinese Society for Community Organization produced the vertigo inducing series of photographs as part of a campaign to raise awareness for this type of living. It reminds us a lot of Skott Chandler’s House Watch series and Michael H. Rohde’s From Below, both giving us a unique perspective of the rooms we live in. The series also harkens back to the extremely cramped (and now demolished) Kowloon Walled City of Hong Kong’s past. In some ways, things haven’t changed.

Previously: 16-square-foot apartment is a vision of tiny housing taken too far

An Architectural Photographer on Saving Russia’s Wooden Churches

2013-02-21T03:06:00-05:00

Just over a decade ago, Richard Davies, a British architectural photographer, struck out on a mission to record the fragile and poetic structures. Austerely beautiful and haunting, “Wooden Churches: Traveling in the Russian North” is the result.

EyeTime 2012 Competition - The Winners

2012-12-10T16:42:00-05:00

The EyeTime 2012 photography competition this morning unveiled the final winners in the two categories, Emerging Talent and Future Voices [...].

The Buildings of Socialism | 'Soviet Modernism 1955-1991: Unknown Histories' at the Architekturzentrum Wien

2012-11-15T19:31:00-05:00

Led by Architekturzentrum Wien director Dietmar Steiner, the curators traveled around the former Soviet Union over a three-year period in search of their often elusive and quickly decaying subjects. Focusing on the former republics—from Estonia to Belarus, Armenia to Uzbekistan—they interviewed the still-living actors of the time and foraged in bookshops for archive material. They eventually uncovered major Soviet typologies...

Architectural Remnants Of World's Fairs Passed

2012-11-15T18:58:00-05:00

"Some of the most important architects of the 19th and 20th centuries were commissioned to construct fair pavilions, dazzling, unusual structures incorporating the most cutting-edge materials and engineering prowess possible at the time," Doskow writes in an artist statement. "Among them are McKim, Mead and White, Louis Sullivan, Gustave Eiffel, Le Corbusier, Ando, Mies van der Rohe and the landscaping of Frederick Law Olmsted."

Timothy Allen's photographic exploration of a Bulgarian ruin

2012-11-12T11:54:00-05:00

The argument for preserving old buildings is a very strong one that I wholeheartedly support myself. However. On the rare occasions that I get to visit a forgotten building as magnificent as this one, I can’t help day dreaming about some of the incredible monumental relics I know back home and quietly wishing that a few more of them had been left to grow old and perish naturally rather than being unceremoniously hooked up to the proverbial life support machine of modern tourism...

Photographer, Timothy Allen, explores the ruins at the Buzludzha monument in Bulgaria.

EyeTime 2012 Competition Finalists

2012-11-09T14:51:00-05:00

The EyeTime 2012 photography competition has announced its finalist entries selected in two categories, Emerging Talent and Future Voices. The competition seeks to publicly promote the research, exploration and investigation among today's emerging talent and the way we digitally produce, distribute, and consume photography in the face of device culture, social networking, and cloud technology.

The winning photographs will be selected by the jury as well as by "EyeTime" when viewed on the competition's Morpholio app.

Iwan Baan explains how he got that New York magazine cover shot

2012-11-05T15:36:00-05:00

“What really struck me, if you look at the image on the left, you see the Goldman Sachs building and new World Trade Center,” said Baan. “These two buildings are brightly lit. And then the rest of New York looks literally kind of powerless. In a way, it shows also what’s wrong with the country in this moment.”

Ezra Stoller’s Architectural Studies

2012-10-19T12:55:00-04:00

Decades ago, Erica Stoller accompanied her father, the architectural photographer Ezra Stoller, on a shoot of the Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza in New York. It was cavernous and dark, but Ezra insisted that a shaft of light would burst through in 15 minutes. “The plaza was full of sun,” she remembers. “It did just what he told it to do.”

Iwan Baan presents TORRE DAVID / GRAN HORIZONTE in Los Angeles

2012-09-28T15:30:00-04:00

It's no secret that we here at Archinect have long been great admirers of Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan. It goes without saying that we were very excited to meet the man personally when he stopped by in Los Angeles this week.

In front of a small group of invited guests at Hollywood's Perry Rubenstein Gallery, Baan presented photos of the installation "TORRE DAVID / GRAN HORIZONTE" he did with Urban Think Tank and Justin McGuirk for this year's Venice Architecture Exhibition "Common Ground" — and won the team the Golden Lion for the Best Project. The installation explores an informal and vertical community in an unfinished and abandoned skyscraper in Caracas, Venezuela (previously on Archinect).

Here is a small selection of Iwan Baan's photographic exploration for "TORRE DAVID / GRAN HORIZONTE". Click here for more photos.

Photo: Iwan Baan

P...

Le Corbusier in Color

2012-09-23T12:52:00-04:00

Toward the end of 1953, Willy Rizzo took a series of portraits of the architect Le Corbusier, three of which were published in the magazine Paris Match. Much of Rizzo’s work was done in medium-format color. These photographs have not been published since.

We are most familiar with iconic b&w photographs of Le Corbusier. Le Journal de la Photographie re-publishes beautiful color photographs by the artist Willy Rizzo shot in 1953 and three of which were published in the magazine Paris Match at the time. These photographs shed a rare light to architect's persona. Enjoy.

Le Corbusier by Willy Rizzo

From Septembre 19th to December 20th, 2012
Maison La Roche
10, square du docteur Blanche
75016 Paris - France

Iconic Photo of Construction Workers Lunching Atop a Skyscraper Was Faked

2012-09-21T19:26:00-04:00

“The image was a publicity effort by the Rockefeller Centre,” Corbis’s chief historian Ken Johnston told the Independent. “It seems pretty clear they were real workers, but the event was organised with a number of photographers.”

Aaron Yassin’s BEIJING on view in Portland

2012-08-23T14:31:00-04:00

If you're in Portland, Oregon these days, don't miss to check out the exhibition BEIJING by visual artist Aaron Yassin, currently on view at Chambers@916. BEIJING, Yassin's latest project, is a series of dynamic and mesmerizing architectural photographic composites built from images of iconic buildings in Beijing, spanning hundreds of years, from the Temple of Heaven to the Bird’s Nest Stadium.

A Stunning Survey Of Pics By Eero Saarinen's In-House Photog

2012-08-15T15:02:00-04:00

In 1954, a young Hungarian went to work with Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. As his then colleague, Cesar Pelli, describes him: “[He] was a small sensation: he had a fur-trimmed coat, a homburg, and a Van Dyke beard.”... He had been a distinguished architectural student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, in Paris, and a draftsman under Le Corbusier... he was quickly tapped as the in-house photographer, creating pictures that became indelible symbols of the Mad Men age of Modernism.

The Architecture of Photography - Conversation with Simona Rota

2012-07-30T15:04:00-04:00

From the eroded optimism of the heroic building-monuments in east-Europe, to the monochromatic banality of housing developments in the Canary Islands, the photographs of Simona Rota appear to be talking to us about the aspirations and shortcomings of architecture in both its megalomaniac and its quotidian streams.
Often lacking human presence, the photographs tell a tale of evaporated intentions, and failed dreams, making through the images a visual statement about the power of humanity to create, alter, and transform our environment.

Images of architecture about topics that transcend architecture, projects like Ostalgia, Instant Village, and Placelessness take us to a personal journey through some of the faces of modernity in Europe, while revealing simultaneously the seducing beauty of its ugliness, and the vulnerability of its invincible architectures.
We are drawn towards the fantastic journey of an upcoming visual story teller that equally dazzles us with an image of the ...

The Other Disney World: A Creepy, Empty Village

2012-07-26T17:23:00-04:00

Outside of Paris lies a “Truman Show like über-replica of a French village from the last century, which seems to have sprung up overnight.”

Using Flickr Geotags to Map the World's Cities

2012-06-27T19:36:00-04:00

You'll also notice a bit of color coding on the maps. Apparently, Fischer was able to guess that the picture taker's mode of transportation--presumably using the time stamps and distance traveled between a user's pictures. He then created a color code: Black is walking (less than 7mph), Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph), Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph); Green is freeways or rapid transit.

Delhi's Modernist Architecture in Photographs

2012-05-31T15:16:00-04:00

Veteran photographer Madan Mahatta took shots of some of the prominent buildings that defined the landscape of Delhi from the 1950s to the 1980s, as the city was embracing Modernist architecture. An exhibition of his work is on at the Photoink gallery in New Delhi till June 21, 2012.

Perry Rubenstein to Inaugurate Los Angeles Gallery With Helmut Newton, Neil Young

2012-05-09T13:52:00-04:00

The architect on the new gallery is the L.A.-based firm wHY Architecture, founded by Kulapat Yantrasast, who worked with Tadao Ando for 15 years, and designed the L.A. branch of New York gallery L&M Arts, in Venice Beach. The firm, Mr. Rubenstein says, was recommended to him by Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch, a New York transplant himself.

The Amazing Infrastructure That Powers IBM, Microsoft, And GE

2012-05-01T12:57:00-04:00

Stoll’s images capture vast and mind-meltingly valuable landscapes that are hidden in plain sight, housed in unassuming warehouses and suburban data centers all over the world.

Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City

2012-04-25T01:53:00-04:00

Almost a million images of New York and its municipal operations have been made public for the first time on the internet. The city's Department of Records officially announced the debut of the photo database. Culled from the Municipal Archives collection of more than 2.2 million images going back to the mid-1800s, the 870,000 photographs feature all manner of city oversight -- from stately ports and bridges to grisly gangland killings.

Chicago Past

2012-04-12T12:42:00-04:00

Chicago Past collects large photos of historic Chicago.

This is a great tumblr blog to follow if you're feeling Chi-town nostalgic.

Pedro E. Guerrero: Frank Lloyd Wright's photographer

2012-03-29T17:07:00-04:00

Emily Bills, director of the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University and co-curator of the exhibit, said the goal was to show how Guerrero, built a career in parallel to photographers such as Shulman but with less fame.

Los Angeles Times interviews Curator / Historian Emily Bills on photographer Pedro E. Guerrero, who is known as Frank Lloyd Wright's photographer. Exhibition and the talk by the artist are not to be missed.

The exhibit runs April 5 to 25 at Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery, 6518 Hollywood Blvd., L.A. The artist, in his 90s, is scheduled to talk at 6:30 p.m. April 5 next door at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 6522 Hollywood Blvd.; (323) 957-1777